Dirty Little Angels

The story takes place in New Orleans and the main character is Hailey who is 16. She has a brother named Cyrus. Her mother and father are still married but are approaching a divorce. Her father has been out of work for months and spends most of his time in a pool hall and avoiding trying to make a serious search for another job. Her mother is still morning a child that died before it was actually born, and she spends most of her time not doing much of anything at all.

Hailey's world is one of poverty, violence, sex and drugs. She ends up involved in the death of one man and carries violence even further later in the book. She has sex with two guys and even ends up in a psych ward place for a short time. She leads a very, very rough life where there seems to be little if any hope of things getting better, a condition that many people have fallen into in the real world, especially during the economic collapse.

The characters are very realistic as is the situation. Most times that's a very good thing, but in this particular case it has an inherent problem, and that is that the reader doesn't have anyone they can feel sympathetic towards or really even terribly interested in. Hailey's situation is terrible, that is true, but the book left me with the feeling that she basically went with the flow and didn't really try to get any help for her problems. She doesn't talk to a priest or minister; she doesn't talk to any of the adults at school; she doesn't talk to any social agency and, when she is in the psych ward, she doesn't really let the person running the group know what is actually going on in her life.

No one has actually made any progress in personal growth from the beginning of the book to the end; they're basically all pretty much the same people they started out to be with the same serious flaws that they had at the start. If anything, a few of them actually get worse. For me, personally, I wasn't satisfied with the book or its ending.

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